What are your favorite emojis?

My favorite emojis are the poop, the sweating face, and the rocket ship. If you stitched those together, you’d get a pretty accurate map of my artistic journey. A lot of crap, a lot of panic and hurtling into the unknown at full speed.

For Inktober 2023, the prompt was Dodge. And being the relentlessly optimistic soul that I am, my first thought was dodging sht. Literal sht. I illustrated it in my usual black and white high-contrast style because if you’re going to dive into the sewer, you may as well do it in style.

What are your favorite emojis?

Avoiding sht looks smart at first. Keep clean, keep safe, stay above it all. But out here in the real world, and especially in art, avoiding sht is the fastest way to die creatively. Sometimes you have to run toward the sh*t storm with your arms wide open and a stupid grin on your face.

You have to do the taxes that you’d willingly jump into an ice bath to avoid. You have to market your art even when it feels like you’re shouting into void. You have to show up on social media even when every cell in your body is screaming at you to binge watch ‘The Wheel of Time’ again.

Most artists aren’t thriving because they’re too busy weaving around the hard stuff like it’s radioactive waste. I want to dodge it too. But thriving as an artist is about wading knee-deep into the muck, getting used to the smell, and building your own pile of beautifully fertile compost for your art to grow and thrive.

So if you’re standing there trying to avoid the mess, I’m telling you: step in. Sink a little. Make a sh*t angel if you have to. That’s where the real art is born.